No one expected the international interest the 1982 surgery generated. "We thought we'd do our little experiment and then report the results," says Dr. Chase Peterson, then U. vice president over health services, who became the university's president later that year.

"If we'd said we were using an artificial gall bladder, we would probably not have had the same interest. There's something about the heart," says Peterson. Some of it was "probably not medical but poetic. 'With all my heart I love you.' 'We have to get to the heart of the matter.' It's a word used throughout civilization to describe the core of the human experience."

It was not the first artificial heart or even the first such instrument used in a human. Dr. Denton Cooley, a Texas heart surgeon, had twice implanted mechanical devices to help heart patients. One patient lived for a few hours after surgery. Many designs had been developed before Clark's artificial heart; his was the seventh design by Dr. Robert Jarvik, and Jarvik's efforts built on the many versions that had gone before that.

Dr. Willem Kolff, who ran the U.'s artificial heart program, is a storied name in the development of artificial organs. In Holland in 1943, he created an artificial kidney, the birth of dialysis, which today keeps thousands with failing kidneys alive.

Kolff immigrated to the United States, landing atthe Cleveland Clinic before the U. wooed him to head its program. Kolff himself, along with a colleague, placed an artificial heart in a dog in 1957. He brought with him to the U. two people, remembers Olsen, founder and president of the Utah Artificial Heart Institute, still located in the old hospital. Tom Kessler was a dental technician who was good at building and molding things, which made him an invaluable part of the artificial heart development team. The other was Dr. Clifford Kwan-Gett, a cardiovascular thoracic surgeon. Along with Kolff, they formed the nucleus upon which the U. built the artificial heart program and thus the heart that beat for 112 days in Clark's chest.

But in Kolff's program, improvements on an earlier version often led to a name change, "great motivation" for excellent work, in Kolff's book.

Jarvik's hearts built on work by Kwan-Gett, who'd had his name on earlier artificial hearts, as had others. Kwan-Gett's heart, which Olsen calls "a very, very good heart," included an innovation that has been used ever since. The device responded in animals to produce cardiac output. When cows implanted with it walked on a treadmill, the blood flow increased automatically.